Alexander the Great — Robin Lane Fox

Lane Fox's biography of Alexander has held its place for decades not because it resolves the historical problems but because it takes them seriously. He reads the ancient sources — Arrian, Plutarch, Curtius — with care and scepticism, reconstructs the campaigns with military precision across twenty thousand miles of terrain, and resists the temptation to reduce Alexander to a single explanatory framework: conqueror, visionary, philosopher-king, or paranoid. The result is a biography attentive to the sheer physical reality of the campaigns — the heat, the distance, the logistics — as well as to the psychology of a man who genuinely believed he was the son of a god.

'A masterpiece of historical biography, combining scholarship with a storytelling gift of the highest order.' — Sunday Times. First published in 1973 and still the standard life in English.